Welcome to the Nanny State, where government takes care of you from cradle to grave.

Judging from the latest statistics, more people are actively and willingly choosing the grave than life in a country in which liberty is waning.

It wasn’t exactly front-page news a week ago when the American Journal of Public Health reported than more Americans now commit suicide than die in automobile accidents.

It isn’t that the government has been so successful at reducing auto accidents. Rather there has been an explosion in the number of suicides.

People are despairing in America – more than ever before.

To make matters worse, the experts say suicides are terribly undercounted because they are unrecognized and classified frequently as accidents.

The increase is in spite of much higher spending by the federal government on suicide-prevention programs.

Of course, it’s easy to blame the suicide epidemic on the economy. That would be the easy course.

But I don’t believe it for a minute. It’s not that Americans don’t have enough toys and gadgets, food and shelter, amusements and diversions. While Americans are hurting economically, I suggest the answer is much deeper than that.

I believe the trend reflects a deep and growing spiritual emptiness in a culture that is more depraved than ever before.

Too many people just don’t find any meaning in life.

Think about it.

We are told from the youngest age in state-run schools that human beings are merely the result of billions of years of evolution from lower life forms and random mutations. There is no Creator God who loves us and to whom we are accountable. There are no laws higher than those government imposes on us – no sin, no ultimate, objective moral code. In fact, human beings are a blight on the planet. It would be better off without us – or at least with a lot fewer of us polluting the air with carbon dioxide and overheating the earth.

Do I have that about right?

Furthermore, prayer and Bible reading are prohibited, but explicit instructions on how to have promiscuous sex without consequences is mandated.

Abortion is subsidized, while adoption is prohibitively expensive – in the unlikely event you can find a child to adopt.

Increasingly, the state is sticking its nose into what we eat, what we say, how we raise our children – even what we believe.

Government is fine with pornography. But purity and abstinence are discouraged.

In other words, right is wrong, up is down, black is white, left is right.

And we sit here and wonder why people are killing themselves.

Government is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

When government replaces God in the lives of people, their lives become empty. They become subjects of the state, rather than citizens endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights – among those being life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The easy way to explain this alarming data would be tough economic times. I’m sure that plays a role. But when government becomes the ultimate authority in our lives and practices lawlessness, disregarding routinely the Constitution from which it derives its limited authority, I would suggest to you this is a much bigger cause for despair and powerlessness.

There is a solution to this problem. But it’s not a top-down answer. It’s a bottom-up solution.

Americans need to get right with God.

They need to find out what He requires of them – why He created them and how much He loves them. They need to be in genuine repentance for having turned away from Him and whored after other false gods and pursuits.

If Americans did this, they wouldn’t be taking their own lives in record numbers.

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